Matthew McConaughey Matthew David McConaughey Born: November 4, 1969 [Uvalde, Texas, U.S.] Alma mater: University of Texas at Austin (BS) Occupation: Actor Years active: 1991–present Matthew David McConaughey (born November 4, 1969) is an American actor. He had his breakout role with a supporting performance in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993). After a number of supporting roles, his first success as a leading man came in the legal drama A Time to Kill (1996). His career progressed with lead roles in the science fiction film Contact (1997), the historical drama Amistad (1997), and the war film U-571 (2000). Acting Career... In the 2000s, McConaughey became known for starring in romantic comedies including The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Failure to Launch (2006), Fool's Gold (2008), and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009), establishing him as a sex symbol. In 2011, after a two-year hiatus from film acting, McConaughey began to appear in more dramatic roles beginning including the legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer, the dark comedy Bernie, and the crime film Killer Joe. In 2012 he gained wider praise for his roles as a stripper in Magic Mike and a fugitive in Mud. McConaughey's portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a cowboy diagnosed with AIDS, in the biopic Dallas Buyers Club (2013) earned him widespread praise and numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actor. He followed it with a supporting role in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and a starring role as Rust Cohle in the first season of HBO's crime anthology series True Detective (2014), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. His film roles earned him varying degrees of commercial and critical success, with his most notable releases being Interstellar (2014) and The Gentlemen (2019), as well as voice work in Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), Sing (2016) and its sequel Sing 2 (2021). Philanthropy McConaughey started the "just keep livin foundation", which is "dedicated to helping teenage kids lead active lives and make healthy choices to become great men and women". On February 25, 2016, McConaughey received the Creative Conscience award from unite4:humanity for his work with his foundation. In 2019 McConaughey officially became a professor of practice for the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the Moody College of Communication at his alma mater, UT-Austin; he had served as a visiting instructor since 2015. The first two sessions were about the filming of the movie Free State of Jones.